La Biennale di Venezia 2026, In Minor Keys
May 9–November 22, 2026
Various locations around Venice, Italy
The 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, In Minor Keys by Koyo Kouoh, features an exciting range of Creative Capital Awardees at the Giardini, the Arsenale, and in various locations around Venice, Italy. The exhibition will run from Saturday, May 9 to Sunday, November 22, 2026 (preview May 6–8).
After the premature passing of Koyo Kouoh in May 2025, the exhibition planning continued with her family’s full support and “notions like enchantment, seeding, commoning, and generative practices that invite collectivities, emerged organically.” Working across photography, film, installation, performance, and multidisciplinary forms, these visionaries bring a collective depth of inquiry to the late Artistic Director Koyo Kouoh’s expansive ideas. Kouoh organized the exhibition not into discrete sections but around a set of conceptual motifs drawn from art that, in her words, acts deeply on the soul. These include Shrines, Procession, Schools, Rest, and Performances.
Among the 110 invited international artists in this year’s Venice Biennale are Creative Capital Awardees Zoe Leonard (2000 Creative Capital Awardee), Nick Cave (2002 Creative Capital Awardee), Cauleen Smith (2008 Creative Capital Awardee), Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn (2012 Creative Capital Awardee), Carolina Caycedo (2015 Creative Capital Awardee), Carrie Schneider (2015 Creative Capital Awardee), Gala Porras-Kim (2015 Creative Capital Awardee), and Guadalupe Maravilla (2016 Creative Capital Awardee).
Miriam Simun (2013 Creative Capital Awardee) performed as part of the Biennale. Denniston Hill’s presentation in the main pavilion in the Giardini includes: Cauleen Smith (2008 Creative Capital Awardee), AK Burns (2015 Creative Capital Awardee), Charlotte Brathwaite (2019 Creative Capital Awardee), Jennie C. Jones (2008 Creative Capital Awardee), Julia Phillips (2025 Creative Capital Awardee), Kalup Linzy (2008 Creative Capital Awardee), Kameelah Janan Rasheed (2022 Creative Capital Awardee), Pablo Helguera (2005 Creative Capital Awardee), Sanford Biggers (2008 Creative Capital Awardee), Steffani Jemison (2020 Creative Capital Awardee), william cordova (2024 Creative Capital Awardee), Zoe Leonard (2000 Creative Capital Awardee).
Legacy Russell (2021 Creative Capital Awardee) participated in conversation and presentation of her Creative Capital-supported book Black Meme as part of Tides of Return at Ocean Space.
THE POOL NYC presents The Glass Aquarium, an exhibition dedicated to the great masters of glass: Dale Chihuly, Tristano di Robilant, Maria Grazia Rosin, and Lino Tagliapietra, presented within Marriage of the Sea (Il Ratto di Venezia), a site-specific installation by Austin Young (2013 Creative Capital Awardee) at Palazzo Cesari Marchesi.
Zoe Leonard
Analogue
Zoe Leonard is a New York–based artist working with photography, sculpture and installation.
Carolina Caycedo
Be Dammed
Carolina Caycedo is an artist who transcends institutional spaces to work in the social realm, where she participates in movements of territorial resistance, solidarity economies, and housing as a human right.
Guadalupe Maravilla
Silent Zoomorph
Guadalupe Maravilla makes work that acknowledges the historical and contemporary contexts of immigrant culture, notably belonging to Latinx communities.
Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn
TVC Communism
Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn is an artist and filmmaker based in Saigon and Los Angeles.
Carrie Schneider
Sphinx
Carrie Schneider is a Brooklyn-based artist working in photography and film.
Cauleen Smith
Remote Viewing and Other Ways of Seeing
Cauleen Smith is an interdisciplinary artist whose work reflects upon the everyday possibilities of the imagination.
Gala Porras-Kim
The Mute Object and Ancient Stories of Today
Gala Porras-Kim is an artist whose work questions how knowledge is acquired and tests the potential of the art object to function as an epistemological tool outside of its traditional, art historical context.
Charlotte Brathwaite
Forgotten Paradise: Gazette’s Sun
Charlotte Brathwaite uses her multidisciplinary directorial talents to highlight unheard, unseen, and overlooked stories of the realities, the threats, and dreams of the marginalized while offering new perspectives in content and form.
A.K. Burns
Negative Space
A.K. Burns is an interdisciplinary artist whose work examines the body politic, highlighting the body’s relationships to culture, politics, performance, and criticism.
Jennie C. Jones
Counterpoint
Jennie C. Jones is a visual artist whose practice resides at the intersection of art history, music history, and black history.
Kalup Linzy
Keys To Our Heart / Romantic Loner
Kalup Linzy is a multi-disciplianary artist living and working in New York.
Pablo Helguera
The School of Panamerican Unrest
Pablo Helguera, a native of Mexico City, is a New York-based artist whose work spans from photography to drawing, performance to installation
stand up next 2 a mountain
william cordova’s practice has been motivated by a creative engagement in architecture, geometry and history to illuminate and shape themes of resistance in our collective landscape.
Steffani Jemison
In Succession
Steffani Jemison uses time-based, photographic, and discursive platforms to examine “progress” and its alternatives.
Austin Young
Endless Orchard
Austin Young is a portrait photographer and video artist based in Los Angeles since 1985.